HPCL-ONGC merger: When corporate governance takes a back seat

A rare exception to this rule was provided by the experience of the merger of the five associate State Banks into the State Bank of India on March 31, 2017

Five months into the merger of HPCL with ONGC, the government is still struggling with the composition of the boards of the two companies.

There is an ONGC officer who sits on the board of HPCL, a company it has bought for Rs 369.15 billion from the central government, but the government has no common representative in the boards of the two companies.

This has resulted in a peculiar mash-up of corporate governance practices. 

Instead, the Government of India has a joint secretary-level officer on the 13-member HPCL board and has two officers as part-time nominee directors for the nine-member